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Ask PG: Is RFS3 "Things built on Twitter" still sensible to prioritise?
Given Twitter's capricious enforcement of its API Rules of the Road, their willingness to allegedly crib features from apps in their ecosystem, and increasingly misaligned incentives vis-a-vis 3rd party developers and users, how long is it before this RFS becomes inordinately risky for YC to specifically solicit?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- obilgic 14y agodalton, is this your fake account?
- jroes 14y agoThere's actually a generally interesting question here: When is an RFS considered "closed?"
- arihant 14y agoIf one cannot answer this question themselves, it's most certainly closed for them.
- pg 14y agoIt certainly doesn't seem as promising a territory as it used to. Not so much because it's more dangerous as because Twitter hasn't turned out to be a "platform" in the same sense as say iOS has.
- maxcan 14y agoDoes the explosion of results-by-tweet at the London Olympics, including first-hand from athletes themselves, shows that as an underlying platform for real time news twitter has strong disruptive potential?
- pg 14y agoYes, Twitter itself is clearly having a big effect on the world.
- maxcan 14y agoSo the conclusion is that Twitter itself will be a significant force for a long time, but principally to their own benefit and building a company entirely dependent on their platform (or any single platform) will continue to be a dangerous game to play.
- donall 14y agoDoes the same apply to Facebook? And if not, is it likely to within the next 12 months? It seems like a lot of developers/startups put their eggs in the FB basket. I wonder if, from a funding perspective, that behaviour would set off alarm bells today?
- pg 14y agoFacebook seems somewhere between Twitter and iOS.
- dave1619 14y agoWould you consider iOS and Android similar in terms of risk and developer potential?
- pg 14y agoTo most startups we fund, iOS is way more important. Nearly all build for iOS first and then maybe one day port to Android. There are a few exceptions like Kyte (http://kytephone.com http://kytephone.com) who use Android to do things you can't do on iOS. And of course Apportable (http://apportable.com http://apportable.com) has been very successful auto-porting iOS apps to Android.
- skibrah 14y agodo you see an API becoming a "platform" in the same sense as iOS/Android or will they remain services that provide content and facilitate specific features?
- w1ntermute 14y ago> Nearly all build for iOS first and then maybe one day port to Android. It's unfortunate that this persists even though Android now has twice the smartphone marketshare iOS has. It doesn't seem like things will be changing any time soon either.
- 14y ago
- wamatt 14y ago@pg - I suspect politics might prevent you from answering, but do you have a view on whether this direction of Twitter's, is smart or beneficial to them in the long run?
- pg 14y agoThey seem to be doing pretty well. They head-faked a lot of developers, but I don't think that was deliberate.
- wamatt 14y ago>They head-faked a lot of developers, but I don't think that was deliberate. Yeah I'd agree with that. Can't say either if this will have major repucussions in the future. Users probably don't care about these issues and dev's will suck it up, because they still want the userbases. That said, a social network can potentially become 'uncool', pretty quickly, especially if they piss on the influencers.
- JayNeely 14y agoDo you feel like Dalton's App.net could grow into a viable alternative?
- gduplessy 14y agoSee @pg's answer here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2341567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2341567
- jazzychad 14y agoMy how things have changed so quickly. I applied to YC for W10 with RFS3, got in, quickly abandoned the idea since the market didn't seem big enough, did something else (Notifo) on mobile platforms which seemed more promising, watched Twitter quickly destroy it's 3rd party ecosystem, decided never to build on top of Twitter again. All within about 18 months.
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- seancallahan 14y agoTwitter is more a part of a distribution strategy than a platform to build an entire business off of http://t.co/r6wdLpMc http://t.co/r6wdLpMc $ZNGA $FB
- riffic 14y agoWhat are your thoughts as to OStatus?
- dustyreagan 14y agoPardon my ignorance, but what is RFS short for?
- robinwarren 14y agoI think there is still a lot of potential in twitter as a platform, specifically for the data they hold. There is a lot of information shared on twitter which previously didn't exist on the internet. It would be shared by people chatting to each other, maybe msning colleagues or emailing links to friends etc. That information suddenly being available is what I think is interesting, and still worthwhile building on. Back in the day, building a twitter client may have seemed reasonable but ultimately turned out to to be 'snatching coins from in front of a steamroller'. I think if you're building something which is a replacement or improvement on the twitter browser UI you're clearly taking a risk. I don't know that other uses of the data they hold are such a risk. Obviously I could be wrong but for me it's at least on the opposite end of the risk spectrum from twitter clients. [disclosure, my current side project uses twitter data. It's in my profile if you want a look]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sjtgraham 14y agoRFS3 is clearly "Things built on Twitter", and just that. Read RFS3.